Smart Home Blog

The acoustics of your room probably have more to do with sound quality of your system than any other component, that's right - those expensive speakers can sound crap in a room with poor acoustics. Inversely mid-level equipment can be made to sing with a properly treated room.

Acoustic foams are generally found as pyramid or wedge shapes. They work not only to absorb sounds, by enhancing the quality of sound and speech in a room. They are able to help tame both mid and high frequencies at the same time to minimize sound echoes and reflections which would colour or muddy the sound.

By reducing the amplitude of the waves, our acoustic foam helps to dissipate the sound energy. This in turn helps the clarity of sound. Bass Traps help to trap the Bass energy to stop booming in the room.

Typically we would use acoustic panels in home cinemas or dedicated stereo listening areas.

As part of any home cinema that we design and install we will run through a full setup so that the image is the very best capable for all of the equipment.

It's amazing the amount of very high end equipment we see that has been incorrectly installed, badly aligned or using the wrong cable or setup. It's pretty easy to make a $10,000 projector act like a $1,000 one if it's configured incorrectly.

Just before Xmas I was running through an optimisation for a recent client - Normally I use AVIA for configuration but this time I had the old Joe Kane DVE (Digital Video Essentials) in PAL DVD format, I used this as the owners at this time will be mainly watching their DVD collection (I know, I know).

Joe Kane

Digital Video Essentials (PAL DVD)

Joe Kane is a bit of a big deal in the video image display measurement industry - so you won't have heard of him, suffice to say his measurement, testing and configuration discs are among the best references available.

I spent around 2-3 hours at the clients house on the video configuration and around the same time on the audio, microphone setups have made things much easier in that regard nowadays, not perfect but pretty good.

Andy Jones day job is as a Bus driver, his real passion though is home cinema and he's dreamed of building one in his back garden since he was a kid.

In 2010 he moved into a new house with 1/4 acre back yard, he applied for planning permission, which was granted and then spent 5 years building his dream cinema. A tribute to beloved ABC movie houses of the past.

Andy built the cinema himself (he used to be a plasterer and kitchen fitter) from reclaimed cinemas. It's been his dream since he was 6 years old and he spent his entire life savings of £70,000 making it happen.

Andy's been collecting movie memorabilia for a long time and this is the culmination of his childhood dream "I’ve been a cinema fan since as long as I can remember and since I was at school I’ve always wanted to build a cinema”

ABC Cinemas were founded in 1927. At one point there were more than 400 of them throughout Britain. Larger multiplexes arriving in the early 1980's ushered their way out of existence.

We like Star Wars, we like Star Wars themed cinemas even more and we like this one a lot.

This recent winner of Screen Excellence’s ‘installation of the month’ is a Star Wars-themed project by Zene Private Cinema.This installation won the CEDIA Global award for Best Home Theatre, so it's pretty special.

Zene Private Cinema worked with interior designer Dominique Amblard and spent a lot of time making sure that their acoustical plans could fit into his design. In fact, the team had to individually cut the sound panels to fit in with the aesthetics.

The screen is 170"and powered by a Sony VW-1100ES 4K Projector on a Screen Excellence acoustic transparent screen. The client wanted Dolby Atmos, which is facilitated via a total of 12 Aragon & James power amplifiers driving three main GTL Sound Labs AP Platinum main speakers, as well as four side, two rear and four ceiling AE963 in-wall surround speakers. These are combined with four Bay Audio subwoofers: two PMT+12 s for ‘impact’ and two PMT+15s for ‘rumble’. Yes that's 2 15" Subs and 2 12" Subs.

A Marantz Dolby Atmos preamp and Zene DZ-24 DSP equaliser were also installed into the custom home cinema, while acoustic treatment is provided for via Quest AI acoustic panels, Fuyi Sound isolation rubber pads and a custom-made 40dB sound isolation door combined with a steel door to achieve the looks and the required 50dB overall isolation.

Finally, the whole installation, including the lighting is controlled using a Control4 system, including a HC-800 controller, C4-SR-250 wireless remote, DIN-8DIM-E lighting module and a KD240-SW Keypad dimmer. The seven reclining seats are from Fortress Seating.

“This project is the result of good teamwork between each stakeholder (the interior designer, Zene and the contractor) – this lead to the success of this amazing project,” Max enthuses. “My favourite part is that this is a gorgeous-looking theatre, but it also sounds very good. Most good-looking theatres don’t sound good!”

Invited by an old colleague and friend who has been working over there for the past few years in construction. We met with some very friendly, very bright and successful people who I hope to be doing work for in the near future. We've worked in Hong Kong before so aren't new to international projects, we've also completed six homes worth of home cinema, lighting control and audio previously with the Project Manager in charge of construction - All that went very smoothly. So this could be really fun.

It's a beautiful place, you can tell it's just on the verge of something special happening in terms of development. I look forward to more visits and the chance to build some very special home environments over there.

Our latest install has us installing a 100" Home Cinema screen in this Phuket villa, the projector is a Sony SXRD one of our favourite projectors.

The projector system at the heart of the VPL-HW45ES is based on Sony’s SXRD technology. delivering Full HD resolution.

Sony has managed to up the VPL-HW45ES’s brightness to 1,800 lumens from the 1,700 lumens of its predecessor. Sony have completely redesigned the internals to deliver improved colour performance and reduced noise levels on this model. There is a new alignment layer element within Sony’s SXRD chipset that improves contrast and black-level depth by retaining greater light focus and efficiency.

Today we are at one of our recently completed home cinemas in Phuket to do a final setup and configuration. Featuring a 120" motorised drop down screen and a Panasonic 1080p Projector and a Klipsch Surround Sound System all controlled by a new harmony Elite all in one remote.

Home Cinema Red levels

Home Cinema Green levels

Home Cinema Blue levels

The projector levels were actually all very good out of the box so there wasn't much to change, I used an old favourite of mine the Joe Kane Digital Video Essentials DVD to setup as currently they are mostly watching DVD's until they build their Blu Ray library up.

Purple levels even?

Colour Levels

Home Cinema test pattern

It's a great cinema, I'm looking forward to the owners watching some amazing movies on it in the future.

I was doing an install up in Hua Hin, Thailand recently and had to do most of the cinema setup during the day, it's a dedicated home theatre room so it was easy to keep the curtains closed. At one point during the install whilst I was tweaking the on screen image someone opened the curtains momentarily.

It served as a reminder as to why you need to control light, I decided to take the following photos of the screen showing exactly the same image, 1st with the curtains closed and 2nd one with a curtain open. The screen completely washed out, I couldn't discern any image whatsoever. This is a bright-ish projector on a Gray screen.